With rapid evolution of a wireless local access network (WLAN) standard, a WLAN system aggregates an increasingly high bandwidth, to obtain a higher transmission rate. In the WLAN standard, before transmitting data, a station generally reserves in advance a channel within a period of time. The reserved channel is used for subsequent data transmission of the station. A bandwidth of the reserved channel of the station determines an available bandwidth in an entire subsequent data transmission process.
In the prior art, a specific process of reserving a channel by a station is: when data transmission a peer device needs to be performed, sensing a primary channel, and when determining that the primary channel is an idle channel, triggering a backoff procedure, that is, starting a backoff counter, to generate a random number, thereby implementing the backoff procedure. Every time when an idle time of the channel reaches a timeslot, the backoff counter is decremented by 1. When the random number generated by the backoff counter is decreased to 0, a bandwidth of the channel is selected, and a reserved frame of the channel is sent on the selected channel. The reserved frame of the channel is used as a reservation for the channel, and data transmission to the peer device is performed on the reserved channel.
However, the solution of reserving a channel by a station in the prior art also has problems of low channel usage efficiency and a waste of channel resources.